3D face recognition based on a modified ICP method

3D face recognition technique has gained much more attention recently, and it is widely used in security system, identification system, and access control system, etc. The core technique in 3D face recognition is to find out the corresponding points in different 3D face images. The classic partial Iterative Closest Point (ICP) method is iteratively align the two point sets based on repetitively calculate the closest points as the corresponding points in each iteration. After several iterations, the corresponding points can be obtained accurately. However, if two 3D face images with different scale are from the same person, the classic partial ICP does not work. In this paper we propose a modified partial Iterative Closest Point (ICP) method in which the scaling effect is considered to achieve 3D face recognition. We design a 3x3 diagonal matrix as the scale matrix in each iteration of the classic partial ICP. The probing face image which is multiplied by the scale matrix will keep the similar scale with the reference face image. Therefore, we can accurately determine the corresponding points even the scales of probing image and reference image are different. 3D face images in our experiments are acquired by a 3D data acquisition system based on Digital Fringe Projection Profilometry (DFPP). A 3D database consists of 30 group images, three images with the same scale, which are from the same person with different views, are included in each group. And in different groups, the scale of the 3 images may be different from other groups. The experiment results show that our proposed method can achieve 3D face recognition, especially in the case that the scales of probing image and referent image are different.